


Eternal

by conceptofzero



Category: Mad Max Series (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-09
Updated: 2015-06-09
Packaged: 2018-04-03 13:34:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,224
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4102810
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/conceptofzero/pseuds/conceptofzero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>On the third day, Nux makes his way to the Citadel, carrying the War Rig’s replacement steering wheel in his hands.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eternal

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the Mad Max kinkmeme.

On the third day, Nux makes his way to the Citadel, carrying the War Rig’s replacement steering wheel in his hands. His clothes are gone, burnt to a crisp in the blast, but all that does is raise more questions. There’s no burns on him, no new scars, nothing at all to indicate that he was caught in the cab of the burning War Rig. The Wretched raise a clammering sound that draws all eyes to the ground where he stands, pale and unmarked, looking lost with his face tilted up towards the Citadel. 

Capable makes it only halfway down the lift before she dangles herself over the edge and drops down into his arms, throwing herself around him. She has been in quiet mourning since the day they returned, writing Angharad and Nux’s names on the walls so none will forget them. They are both dead, both dead and gone, and yet here returns Nux from the desert. It shouldn’t be real, he shouldn’t be alive, yet here he is. 

“It burnt, I remember it burning,” he tells them all later, after they’ve marveled at his resurrection. Nux tells them how it felt when the world pitched around him, when the cab closed up tight and all he could taste and feel were the flames as everything around him was consumed in the crash. How long it burned, he can’t say, only that he lay there waiting for death to take him and relieve him of his agony, but that it didn’t, and when night came and cooled the metal, he was still alive. “Four times now, the gates were opened and closed.” 

It’s a marvel, celebrated by all (but most of all by Capable, who had no taste for grieving and was quite happy to put the practice behind her) and a miracle - proof to the Wretched that Immortan Joe had fallen from favour with the Gods, while Furiosa and Nux had been raised up. Furiosa does her best to stop that talk from happening where she can hear it, but it continues anyway, though people are smart enough to keep it low where it can’t be heard. 

There are questions of course, but there’s so much more that needs to be done. They haven’t time to sit around fighting over the whys of Nux’s return. He’s here, and he’s alive, and that’s enough. There’s so much more left to worry about - Gas Town controls the fuel, and though it’s running on a skeleton crew, the Citadel isn’t strong enough to take it by force. And there’s the trouble with the Bullet Farm, and there’s always marauders out there, and as soon as it spreads that Joe is gone and dead, they’ll be hounding the Citadel, hoping to find easy prey. The mysterious reason for Nux’s return is much less important, and so it’s quickly put aside, business to be dealt with some other day, or never. 

For three cycles, it’s not thought of again, except now and then by Capable and Nux. The Wretched become used to water and the once-wives-now-sisters become accustomed to callouses, a fair trade for being people instead of things. They build defenses and raise the war boys up and away from the worst of Joe’s death cult trappings, keeping the love of machines but not the love of an early grave. The Dag learns much about how to grow using very little dirt and a lot of water, beginning the process of turning the Keeper of the Seed’s legacy into something living. Her baby is born and she names her Fern and most days, the babe can be seen on Dag’s back, looking cheerfully out at the world. She is a bit ugly, as Dag suspected she would be, but it’s fine - the women have learned that sometimes it’s better not to be beautiful in this world. 

Toast busies herself learning every weapon she can get her hands on, running the armoury as days pass and taking control of the running of patrols. Cheedo isn’t ever quite sure what to do with herself, so she dabbles here and there, learning many things but mastering none. Capable and Nux end up tending to the boys, raising them up and teaching them new ways to be men. And Furiosa keeps the Citadel running, keeps it functioning, keeps them all safe. 

At the end of the third cycle, there is an assassination attempt. Furiosa has been waiting for it for some time now, and yet she’s still caught by surprise. She’s been expecting someone to make a move, and though she’s kept guards on Corpus Collosus, and though she’s been careful when meeting envoys from Gas Town and the Bullet Mines, she didn’t expect it would be someone in the Citadel to try kill her. But people have prices, especially in the Wasteland, and when she is in the middle of addressing the citizens of the Citadel (an act she never enjoys and often makes as short as possible), two hands slam into her back and push her over the edge. 

She doesn’t fall easy, grabbing onto anything she can on the way down, but she falls all the same. Furiosa feels horror and terror and then some grim spark of satisfaction as she sees her assassin come tumbling after her. And then there is nothing but the ground and the horrible overwhelming pain that sweeps through every part of her as she contacts with it. It’s not the kind of death they make songs out of, but she supposes that when it comes to deaths she could have, it’s not the worst. And at least she doesn’t have to live with the embarrassment of it all. 

Except, as it turns out, she does, because she wakes up. Every bone in her body should be broken, and all of her should be a wet splat across the ground, but she’s alive. She’s in terrible pain, but she’s alive and breathing. The Wretched are among her (and she needs to stop thinking of them like that, they’re the Blessed now, but old names die hard) and they’re raising her up, calling for help, for people mechanics. Her neck aches but she can turn it, and as she does, she sees her assassin splattered across the ground, as she should have been. 

“It wasn’t luck,” she says later, when she can speak, lying in a hospital bed. Furiosa is not an idiot. She’s survived plenty that should have killed her, but bodies have limits. Her missing arm is proof of it. There’s not a scratch on her, not a single scar from falling hundreds and hundreds of feet. They had to scrape up the assassin, pushed over by Cheedo (and poor Cheedo was locked away in her quarters crying over killing that man, even if it had been no less than what he deserved and far better than what he would have gotten from Furiosa). “This wasn’t anything like that. I should be dead. Anyone else who’d fallen that far would have died.” 

“Not Nux.” Capable sits on the end of the cot, winding her hair around one of her fingers. “He walked out of that wreck that should have killed him too. You both survived what you shouldn’t have.” 

Furisoa isn’t certain what to make of it. The only thing they have in common is that they were both war boys for Joe (of a sort anyway). And other war boys have died easy, real easy. Half the trouble these days is keeping them alive, talking them out of seeking something chrome and glorious when they could easily come back alive and live another few years (or more, if they stay healthy and away from the radiation). “We need to be more careful about who’s allowed up here. And we need to give the Wr- those below something better so they can’t be so easily bought or bribed.” 

“We should find out why it is you two can’t die either,” Capable prompts again. She lets go of her hair and slaps both her hands on her knees. The more time she spends with those war boys, the more she moves like them. “People are going to want to know that. It’s a valuable thing.” 

The Dag’s been feeding Fern and she tilts her head to the side, thinking it over. “Bet it would burn that bastard’s ass to know you and Nux did for real what he always had to lie about.” 

Furisoa will admit that it does feel a little nice to have this revenge over Joe, who was nothing more than flesh and bone in the end. She lets Capable go looking into it and gets back to ruling as soon as the ache in her bones is dull enough to walk on without pain. Hitting the ground hurt, even if it didn’t injure her. Nux says the same about how even after the flames stopped, he still felt like he was burning for days afterwards. 

There aren’t any more assassination attempts, but each cycle brings new revelations. When a lift fails and a car comes crashing down, Nux shoves a pair of war boys out of the way and is smashed by it. But it doesn’t crush him and he’s alive when they clear away the bits of the semi, finding him lying beneath it. Two cycles after that, she cuts herself while helping make dinner and though she bleeds at first, it dries up quick and when she pushes the wound together, it sticks there and won’t come apart until she can’t find where it hurt in the first place. 

Capable teaches and Dag plants and Toast organizes and Cheedo keeps on experimenting, happy just to be learning new things each day. Furiosa keeps on leading. Walls go up and buildings get made with clay and water to make bricks, and each day she looks down to find a settlement spouting at the base of the Citadel. The treaty with Gas Town and the Bullet Farm holds, even as the two change in their own ways. Nux doesn’t die, though his tumors never go away either, Larry and Barry always at his neck no matter the season. 

Fern gets old enough to wander on her own. Capable and Nux have two of their own, two cheerful boys named Ang and Rad. The others choose not to have children, though in time, Toast takes a husband from Gas Town and Cheedo takes a wife from the Blessed. Furiosa and Dag remain without, their lives full enough as is. Sometimes they tease her, asking if she's waiting for Max. She isn't, but she still looks for him now and then, listening to rumors. In all her years, there has been no other person who ever seemed to think so much like her, who fell in sync with her so quickly. 

Time passes and she tries forget the strange circumstances of her life in order to focus on her people, but there is always something. Capable reports to her with the particulars of Nux - that he can bruise and he can be cut in small ways, that bones heal quick but also sometimes they don’t break, that there are no easy rules as to what will and won’t be permanent when he’s hurt. When his hand is crushed, it is fine again within a day. When he trips chasing Rad around the Boys chambers, he breaks his nose, and it never heals quite right, always pointing a little to the left. 

Furiosa takes her tales and keeps them with her own, which she is reluctant to share. After a lifetime of being barren, she has started to bleed in time with the moon. She hides this, not wanting the others to know how strange and alien it is to her to wake with blood on her thighs. She has also stopped aging. Furiosa grows no younger, but when she shaves her head each morning, she notes that no more grey hairs have joined what was there before the Fury Road. Nux is the same, and as Capable grows older day by day, he still looks the same as the day he walked out of the wreckage, eternally caught in his half-life. 

It becomes harder and harder to ignore as cycles pass, as the settlement expands and the name of Citadel is forgotten, turning the towers into a place known as the Canal. Fern grows up tall, and though she never shakes her father’s looks, she is unlike him in every way, tending to the greenery with her mother and recording all knowledge about plants into a single book. Ang and Rad grow as well, until they are nearly as tall as their father, and soon people confuse them as they pass by them in the halls, taking them for brothers. Everyone moves forward, growing old, developing wrinkles, hair turning grey and then white. Everyone, except Furiosa and Nux. 

Cheedo, who never settles on one singular thing to do, ends up answering why that is. All her years of moving from one subject to the next answer it for her, and she tells them all, the Sisters and Furiosa and Nux as they knit late one night, turning spun hair into whatever they need. “I think it was Max’s blood that’s made you immortal.” 

“Is that something that actually happens?” Dag’s knitting a cap for Fern’s youngest, a bright-eyed baby who thankfully takes after her father instead. “You think we would have seen more of it then.”

“How many of the Blessed were allowed to have transfusions?” Toast points out, stitching up straps for a new pair of googles. “And we know it wasn’t just regular blood that did it or we’d be up to our necks in immortal War Boys.” 

“There’s only me. I’ve been keeping watch all these years.” Nux is spinning with red hair tonight, a present to him from Capable. Their ages are changed, but they still look like lovers when they stay close to one another, hips and knees pressed together for silent comfort. “There’s no more real War Boys left anymore, just grown pups. It’s only me and you left.” He says this, looking over at Furiosa. 

She sets her knitting aside and thinks it over. There’s truth here - Nux was attached to Max when they first found each other in the wastes, the IV still in him when they cut the chain. And though she doesn’t remember it, she knows that Max gave her his blood and his name while they travelled home, to the new Green Place. “Cheedo, are you sure?” 

“No, but I’m as sure as I can be. It’s the thing you two have that’s the same. And Max himself lived through what he shouldn’t. I’ve asked around - did you know when they brought him here, he escaped? He ran all through the Citadel and came across the sky-hook opening. He threw himself out it.” Cheedo seems to have enjoyed her turn as historian, though now that Furiosa thinks about it, she’s been doing that longer than anything else she’s done. “Some of the Blessed saw it. I always thought he’d jumped because he was mad, but… maybe he knew he would live, even if he fell.” 

Maybe… Furisoa’s not sure. Max fought like a man with only one life to live. But he had survived so much, as much as she and Nux had. So she tucks that away too with the rest, considering the mystery mostly solved, even if it isn’t. 

Then Capable says, “Hold on a moment, look at this” and sets up what she’s been knitting. It’s a handful of dolls, and it doesn’t take much for them to realize that she’s made the Sisters, including Angharad. It’s been so long since they spoke of her, and the rest of the night is spent sharing stories, remembering how brave she was, how bold and yet how kind. 

It’s not the last time they all gather, but the days are limited even then. Cycles come and go, and so do they. Dag passes first, laid to rest in the greenery that she turned into her life’s work, the title of Keeper of the Seeds passing on to Fern. Toast goes next, a few years after her husband passes, and then Cheedo passes before her wife, though not much longer before in the end. Capable lasts the longest, so long that Furiosa wonders if Nux has given her some of his blood. But when their boys are grown men with their own families, when her hair has gone a dusty grey, when she relies on Nux to help her find her way to their berth, then she finally passes peacefully in her sleep. They lay her to rest in the Green Place, where the others still sleep. 

Nux comes to her at night, weeping and looking young as ever, younger than his boys now. They are the last of their kind in the Neck. “I tried to give her my blood but she said she didn’t want that. She said she loved me, but she didn’t want eternity. I tried anyway, but it doesn’t work when it’s you and me.” 

Furiosa has never been terribly comfortable holding anyone, but she holds Nux that night, letting him weep against her shoulder as if he were a child. In some ways, he still is, forever held on the cusp of becoming a man. Joe is long dead, forgotten by nearly all, but Nux forever bears the scars of his making. So does she. 

On the seventh day, Nux goes out into the Wastes. She sends him with a motorcycle and all the water he can carry. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he knows he can’t stay here, not while his grief is so fresh. 

“I’ll see you, in time,” she tells him, knowing it to be true. Even if all other people pass, there will be three left for certain - Nux, Furiosa, and Max. 

He raises a hand, grasping in her direction and bringing his hand to his breast. She returns the gesture, no longer rusty to her fingers after all these years. Swaddle Dog and all the Many Mother’s tribes have passed on, but the gesture remains. Her people are gone, but she remains as well, shouldering their memory and the memory of the sisters, of all the sisters she’s ever known. 

Then he starts the bike and heads West. She watches until he becomes a speck, a cloud of dust already fading, before she returns to the Canal. 

Time is a slippery thing. Before, when she still thought the Green Place of Many Mothers still lived, she felt every single second like a physical weight on her. Each day was counted and added to those she could remember, Furiosa carving it in her skin and later on her arm, a small tally she kept adding to until the number turned so large that she was forced to find other ways to count it. Things changed after the War Rig and those frantic few days in the desert. Time started slipping then, slow at first, and then quick as she started losing the people she marked her days and weeks by. 

She gives up her place as ruler when she wakes and cannot remember how many cycles it has been since the last of the sisters was laid to rest. There are many young people who will do a good job, and though she stays to make sure they do, she finds herself content to hand over the matter of speeches to those who enjoy them more than her. Instead, she becomes a sort of ghost, haunting the Canal (now known as Oasis, though she’s sure that name will change too), appearing when people need help remembering the past. Time may move fast for her, but she still remembers things, even though only she and the History People do anymore. 

Furiosa often wonders what’s happened to Max. He must still be out there, somewhere, though maybe he’s gone. Maybe they can die, if they find the right way. She remembers Nux’s broken nose and Max’s leg brace, and she touches her arm, fingers finding the smooth end of it. Maybe both Nux and Max are gone by now, and she’s the only one left. It’s not a nice thought, but it’s harder to turn it aside when she doesn’t have the Canal to run anymore. 

She begins driving a rig again. The steering wheels remain attached at all times and she hauls water out to what was once Gas Town (now the Eternal Flame) and Bullet Town (now the Shine Mine) and to their other colonies, to the Free Place, where trading happens, and to the Caverns, where people live beneath the earth. She has always felt at home among the roads, with grease running down her face, and here she finds her center again and her grasp on time. 

Furiosa counts the days again. She is a living miracle to some, but she is forgotten to many others. Even with water, most don’t live for long out here. 7000 days is a lifetime for most, double that for the long-lived, and she has long since passed that threshold five times over. People tell stories but no one believes she is the same Furiosa. Her name becomes a sort of myth, a tale of a woman who found the twin rocks and raised water from the earth. Joe is unknown now, his legacy wiped away by the years. Furiosa remains, though she would hardly know herself in these tales. 

When she returns to the Green (once the Oasis, once the Canal, once the Citadel), hauling a tanker full of guzzoline, she spots a familiar face waiting for her in the bay. Nux is the same, though he is dressed strangely. His lips still sport familiar scars and his eyes are bright as ever, calling out to her as soon as he spots her. “Furiosa! I’ve found him! I’ve found him!” 

She doesn’t need to ask who ‘him’ is. Furiosa stops her rig, handing it over to one of the mechanics, and then they’re running through the Green, up the stairs to the chambers that are still hers, even after all these long cycles. 

Max waits for her there. He looks the same, though he’s gone all ragged, away from a razor for too long. He looks sheepish, as if shy to see her. His voice is rusty as ever when he speaks, and she spots he’s still wearing his knee brace (and that Nux’s nose is still a little crooked). “I uh. Didn’t realize.” 

Furiosa takes him in. She takes them both in, Nux and Max, and she says to Max, “It has been 40,000 days since you were here, of the days that I can remember counting.” 

He bows his head. After a moment, he offers his hand to her. It’s an apology. Maybe once she would have been angry for what he did to her, for the years, but it has been so long, so long, that she no longer worries about that. Instead, she takes his hand, just glad to have him here again. 

“How long will you stay?” Furiosa asks. Max raises his head, the sheepish look gone, and she finds herself intrigued by the way his eyes snap to her and then to Nux. 

“We came back here for you, and for water, but we aren’t staying. You shouldn’t either.” Nux looks so eager, and he’s so different from the Nux that left, carrying his crushing grief. He’s back to what she remembers of him before, when his world was happy. “It’s time to go, Furiosa.” 

Max says nothing. He squeezes her hand instead, giving a short little grunt. With his other hand, he draws out a map and lays it out for her to see. There’s the Green, and there, beyond it, she spots another dot. Max taps that one. It’s a long ways away, a much longer ride than the last one he suggested all those cycles ago. She tries to remember what he said once - 160 days ride across the salts? 

What lies across them now, she wonders, what lies here at the edge of Max’s map that has him and Nux so determined to take her there? 

While she looks, she finds Nux in close, and he brushes his hand against hers, waiting for her permission to take it. She flexes her hand lightly before offering it, letting him grasp it. There’s an enraptured look on his face, one she remembers. Once, he was filled with religious ecstasy. Then he held that look in his eyes each time he saw Capable. Now? She’s not sure what it means now. 

They look to her, waiting a decision. 

In the morning, they leave the Green behind. Max has a car that fits them all easily, and they tow a pod of guzzoline behind them. She still isn’t certain what awaits them out beyond the salt flats, or what lies at the edge of Max’s map, but Furiosa knows they’ll find out sooner or later. 

It is the first day of her count, the first day off into the unknown.


End file.
